David Cameron will be an excellent former prime minister

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Petronella Wyatt's portrait of David Cameron will get lots of attention because of her slightly saucy tales of the young PM's romantic style (warm, wandering hands, if you must know), but it deserves to be taken much more seriously than that because it's one of the best, most measured accounts of Mr Cameron's character and temperament written in a long time.

Perhaps best of all are the thoughts on the Cameron post-premiership, which we know will start by 2020 and – if the referendum goes against him – possibly much earlier.

According to the very well-connected Ms Wyatt, our current Prime Minister has already started thinking hard about what sort of former prime minister he wants to be. Mr Cameron, she writes " Does not care if he is disliked, particularly as he has already planned a future outside of politics, which is to emulate the money-making skills of Tony Blair. Besides, he will always be popular in what is called London ‘society.’ "

Whether this is true I do not know. I find it a little hard to believe that Mr Cameron will show the same rather vulgar dedication to wealth that Mr Blair has displayed, to the dismay of even those who admired his politics and policy. Mr Cameron is not a materially greedy man. He does not covet wealth or its trappings because he simply takes them for granted.

Having been born wealthy, he has the absolute confidence of his class that he will die that way. But I do think it is reasonable to suggest that Mr Cameron will be a happy former prime minister, in a way that others have not.

Mr Blair, for instance, is haunted by thoughts of what might have been. By assembling for himself what looks very much like a private Ministerial office and dabbling in foreign policy he shows many signs of a man who hasn't quite let go of the job he used to do. And as for Gordon Brown, well let us simply say he is rarely accused of being content in his own soul.

Sir John Major is a much better model of a happy post-premiership. But even he took some time to come to terms with his departure from office.

Assuming – and it is a big assumption – that Mr Cameron gets to leave office on something like his own terms, he will very likely be perfectly content with his lot as a former prime minister. Not prone to excessive introspection or self examination, he will be untroubled by questions of what he did and did not do in office. Instead he will probably reflect that what matters more than how he did the job is the fact that that he did it.

Doubtless he will indeed make some money, but in a discreet and classy way. He will work on quasi-political charitable projects, many of them looking and sounding like the Big Society social reform agenda he has sketched out over the last decade. And he'll play a lot of tennis.

Will that be enough though? Ms Wyatt has one final intriguing thought here: "Lately, he has been telling friends that he hopes to return to Government one day." Personally, I have my doubts about that. Yes, said he'll stay in the Commons after 2020, but you don't have to go far to find Tory colleagues who don't think he means it. Instead, they expect him to be the first PM since Margaret Thatcher to go to the Lords. Persistent gossip even suggests he'll take an earldom, just as his hero Harold Macmillan did.

Whatever becomes of him, I rather hope he does stay involved in frontline politics and maybe even comes back into government. That's not so much a comment on him personally as an expression of my belief that former leaders should hang around and contribute a little bit more than they do. For all their sins, the Commons would be better if Mr Blair and Mr Brown were still in it as active members.

It's a regrettable and very modern tradition that former premiers depart the stage as soon as they leave Downing Street. Harold Wilson stuck around after one defeat and eventually won a second term as Premier. Alec Douglas-Home stepped down as prime minister but later served his party and country as Foreign Secretary.

There is, one presumes, a snowball's chance of Mr Cameron serving under Prime Minister Boris Johnson. But could he eventually provide some service to a later or younger Conservative PM? Perhaps he could become a Ken Clarke-type senior counsellor in the government of Prime Minister Tracey Crouch or Tom Tugendhat?

Perhaps the most important fact about Mr Cameron's post-premiership is that it will be long. Today aged 49, he will be no older than 53 when he leaves office, leaving him with decades to fill the void left by the most all-consuming job any British politician can do.

How history will judge the Cameron premiership remains to be decided; the verdict will turn on the referendum result. But events will surely prove that however he gets there, David Cameron will be a first-class former prime minister.